Resistance (Relic Wars Book 1)

by Max Carver

  The actual hangar was immense, reminiscent of the Caffey mine before its untimely fiery collapse. Clusters of hanging lights sputtered to life, revealing motorized ladders and mechanics' carts mounted on cherry pickers. Catwalks spanned the area near the ceiling, far overhead, and they'd been opened like drawbridges to accommodate the immense starship.

  “Ladies and gentleman!” Malvolio gestured with a flourish toward the ship, his voice echoing artificially as he spoke, for added drama. “It is my pleasure to present to you the Omicron Rex, finest ship of its class, and undoubtedly the finest ship still existing on this planet.”

  “That thing is a...beast.” Bartley whistled, pacing back and forth, trying to take it all in. “I wasn't expecting anything like this. How did they get it down here? How do we get it out?”

  “It's the biggest ship I've ever seen parked down on a planetary surface,” Iris said. “Something this big is usually built in outer space and spends its whole life out there.”

  “That must be the reason for the supplementary rockets.” Hagen pointed at the eight steel boosters, bigger than grain silos, parked around the perimeter of the ship. “To help lift this monster out of Caldera's gravity well. I've read about these Rex-class mining ships. Only ten or twelve were ever actually built before the war put a stop to extravagant projects. These were industrial capital ships, the miners' equivalent of carriers or destroyers, meant to spend months at a time harvesting the asteroid belts. I never thought I'd get to see one of these beauties in person.”

  Eric couldn't help staring at the giant ship. Like anyone in his right mind, Eric had expected something much smaller, a mid-sized workship at best.

  Eric thought of the crowded cargo carrier on which he'd traveled from his home system to this one, with stopovers and layovers in other systems along the way. The carrier had been converted from a Colonial League military carrier; just two years earlier, riding aboard the same craft would have brought a huge risk of being attacked by Earth Alliance forces at any moment along the way.

  Instead, it had been a fascinating voyage for Eric, who'd never left his home planet before. Over a period of eighteen weeks, he'd looked down on three different inhabited planets in three different star systems, wishing he could visit while the carrier orbited them, but the shuttle fees were expensive for a private passenger. He'd stayed in fourth class, in a crowded cabin of students and migrant workers, and he'd loved and feared all the new people and worlds.

  The star systems were located light-years apart, unreachable from each other by any human means of transport. Only the wormholes made travel between them possible. Travel within systems took days or weeks, depending on the speed of the particular ship and the distance from the gate to the inhabitable world within the system.

  The ancients seemed to only build their gates in systems with habitable worlds, which was extremely convenient for exploration and colonization. However, the gates usually orbited planets in the outer reaches of the system, far from the habitable zone. One theory was that the positioning was a kind of test: a species had to develop interplanetary travel on its own before reaching the wormhole gates and gaining interstellar travel. Another view of the same theory was that a higher barrier to entry helped keep out the low-level alien riffraff that hadn't yet reached beyond their own planet's orbit.

  Every moment since departing the Lightpoint spaceport back on Gideon had been thrilling and terrifying, even just eating cheap noodles from a street stand in Canyon City, looking up at the weak moonlight and harsh, ashy cloud cover of the alien world.

  Now he was finally leaving Caldera, and it would be in the strangest ship he'd ever seen.

  It was several stories high, bulky with armor and gigantic gear, huge versions of tools Eric used every day—mining drills, rock saws, cutting lasers. It really was designed for tearing apart asteroids. He also recognized the outlines of crushing mechanisms in the ship's refinery module.

  “Those rockets are a good sign, right?” Iris asked. “Maybe they were close to launching the ship, putting it back to work.”

  “Let's hope so,” Hagen said. “Because there's no telling how long we have until those worms decide to come for us. We need to check everything for corrosion...the rockets, the ship's reactor...there must be a user manual for that somewhere...we've got a million things to do. I don't suppose we're lucky enough to have a starship pilot here?” He glanced among the small group, letting his gaze linger extra-long on Iris.

  “I can navigate,” she said.

  “That's a hell of a lot better than nothing. Anybody rated to fly anything, then? Starfighter?”

  “I was an air cavalry pilot with the Colonial League,” Carol said. “I have multiple aeronautical ratings, but nothing astronautical. I have a couple hundred starfighter hours in simulator. A few simulated destroyer hours, too, but that was just for fun...”

  “Welcome to the flight crew,” Hagen said. “I've got a rating to fly a Class I armored personnel shuttle, though I can't say I've done it recently. That only gets us from the surface to low orbit, but any ship worth its salt can handle deep space on its own.”

  “I have a Class III shuttle license,” Bartley said. “With a couple black bars, but both of those are due to come off in just twenty months. I'm still technically allowed to fly in extreme emergencies when absolutely nobody better can be found anywhere—”

  “Good enough,” Hagen said. “The three of you come up to the bridge with me. The rest of you check into the food and water situation. This ship looks like a real snail to me. We could be out there for weeks. So find more painkillers for me...a wheelchair would be golden, so I can get my ass off this drama-bot's hands.”

  “And coffee,” Bartley said. “Or Brain Lightning. All you can find. I mean it.”

  “You should find ample supplies in the commissary,” Malvolio said. He rolled toward the ship, carrying Hagen, followed by Bartley and Carol. Bartley flashed a huge smile at the red-haired helicopter pilot, who walked a little faster to avoid eye contact. Iris followed, glancing back at Eric before she reached the ship, her face inscrutable.

  A ramp creaked open ahead of them, apparently at a wireless signal from Malvolio. It revealed a corridor into the ship wallpapered in silky blue and silver, illuminated by a shattered-geode chandelier; not exactly the interior Eric would have expected from the ship's outer appearance.

  As the dangerously underqualified flight crew boarded the huge mining ship, Eric hurried out of sight, along with Alanna and Naomi, all three of them motivated by Malvolio's last word: commissary. He might as well have said treasure trove.

  They found it quickly, and while the refrigerators were full of hideous rotten filth, the cabinets offered shelves of canned and bottled foods. The freezer even held a few pleasant surprises. The hangar complex clearly had an independent source of power that had kept the lights on all these years, maybe a reactor somewhere on a lower level, maybe hidden hydroelectric source powered by the nearby river.

  Soon Eric was gorging on pickles and tinned sausages while heating a platter of bean burritos in the microwave. He guzzled a can of orange juice and washed it down with a bottle of water.

  They hardly spoke, just tore into the food like hungry wolves, like starving prisoners offered one final meal of canned pears and deviled ham.

  When the burritos were ready, they sat at a long, dusty cafeteria table. Naomi had found a chocolate cake in the freezer, and she and Alanna were chiseling and eating chunks of it, not even bothering to warm it up.

  “Wow.” Naomi leaned back and wiped her mouth on a polka-dotted cloth napkin. The cafeteria had a somewhat annoying polka-dot theme, from the dishware to the patterns painted on the walls. “I didn't think I'd ever stop, but now I'm actually stuffed.”

  “I'm getting there.” Alanna nibbled at a cube of frozen cake. “This is the first time in hours that I haven't felt like we were all about to die. I'm lucky I was with you guys when all this happened.”

  “Lucky?” Naomi
laughed and lit one of her thin cigars. “You've got a funny idea of lucky.”

  “I saw where my apartment building used to be,” Alanna said. “I normally would have been at home, not down in a mine. I would've died.”

  “Me, too,” Eric said. “My place got completely wiped out.”

  “So what's going to happen now?” Naomi asked. “After we leave this star system?”

  They both looked at Alanna. She finally asked, “Why are you staring at me?”

  “Because you're, you know,” Naomi said. “One of those people. So what are you going to do? Send a military force to Caldera to wipe them out?”

  “Maybe you should send out expeditions, too,” Eric said. “Try to find out where they're from. And how many are out there...how many worlds they have.”

  “Okay, look.” Alanna set down her cake and took a sip of water. “So you know who my father is, but you should understand something. I'm the seventeenth of seventeen kids. My mother is my father's fourth wife...and his only non-Chinese wife. Those three older wives are still alive, still married to him, and they're a tight little gang against my mother. She's the outsider, the total trophy wife, and the Three Shrews want the trophy case kept way, way down in the basement. And on top of all this, I'm just a daughter. That still means you count for less in just about any culture that exists, I don't care what anyone says. My father didn't want me involved in the major businesses, nothing but the luxury hotel and pleasure-craft concerns, which are not major. Not the real meat, the chemicals, the manufacturing, the core of his empire.

  “That's why I'm here on Caldera. Mining is a root industry. It doesn't get any more fundamental than this. None of my spoiled, bratty brothers wanted to come here for a long stay. So I'm here to show Father that I can run any part of Li Holdings. Not just the cutesy side businesses.

  “So you're right,” Alanna continued. “If the Colonial League military does something about these monsters, my father will certainly be involved in that decision, especially where Huayuan forces are concerned. I hope they come and wipe them out, and I will plead for that. The aliens have shown us no mercy, and we should show none to them. Humanity cannot afford to ignore this threat. But all I can do is plead. I'm not the Empress of the Galaxy over here.”

  The three of them sat quietly for a moment, then Naomi cracked open a can of Cherry Penguin soda. The cartoon penguin mascot on the front wore red-ringed sunglasses, a red beret, and drove a cherry-red convertible. When she opened the can, the cartoon animated, driving in circles around the surface of the can.

  “I guess that answers that,” Naomi said.

  “Alert! Alert, everyone! I've been sent here on a most urgent mission.” Malvolio unicycled into the cafeteria. “Frustrations swell and tempers flare as the flight crew awaits its infusion of caffeine and other vital nutrients!” He loaded up on canned food and drink and whooshed back out of the commissary.

  “Flight crew.” Naomi shook her head. “Bartley, Hagen, and a helicopter pilot.”

  “At least the gatekeeper is qualified,” Eric said.

  “Yeah, our lives are in your new girlfriend's hands.”

  “She's not my girlfriend.”

  “Then why you so defensive?”

  “I'll take a quick, fiery death over being eaten by worms,” Alanna said. “Or slowly starving in space, so let's load up...”

  They found a service cart and piled it with provisions. There wasn't much actual coffee that hadn't rotted away, but they had plenty of ultra-high-energy drinks, like Peak Penguin and Brain Lightning. Malvolio returned to carry another armload.

  Then they returned to the hangar.

  The ship truly was monstrous. Eric couldn't help acting like a country tourist gaping up at the tall buildings of Lightpoint, his home planet's capital. The ship was almost breathtaking in its ugliness, its raw and undisguised industrial power, a huge harvester meant to gather and thresh metal-rich asteroids instead of wheat.

  “That thing's going to blow up when we try to launch, isn't it?” Naomi whispered.

  “Probably,” Eric said. “But Alanna's right—still beats getting eaten by worms.” He couldn't shake the images of how the two worms had torn Bowler Junior limb from limb, their teeth clacking together like swords as they fought over every bite.

  They walked up the ramp, into the ship's shiny, weird cheesy-nightclub corridor.

  Soft red carpeting led to a cafeteria that had been decorated like a ballroom. Deflated balloons hung on strings from tables and chairs and lay scattered across the floor like fallen leaves. Microphones had been set up on a small stage in the corner. A banner read Omicron Rex 3.0: Now The Galaxy's Most Advanced Asteroid-Cutter!

  “That is a weird environment for a mining ship,” Naomi commented, looking over at bartender and casino-game stations along one wall.

  “It looks like they dolled it up for a ribbon-cutting ceremony,” Alanna said. “Probably to prove to the board and major shareholders that the huge expense of upgrading this ship—down in a planetary-surface dock, no less, this whole set-up is ridiculously expensive—anyway, show the people who mattered that the money hadn't been wasted. In corporate politics, a lavish party with much ass-kissing never hurts.”

  “But wouldn't a huge party be a waste of money?” Eric said. “That doesn't make sense.”

  “The human ego is an emotional beast, not a logical one,” Alanna replied.

  They moved on, into corridors more muted and gray, no carpet, no lavish décor. Nobody had dressed the rest of the ship for a party; it was a place for hard, serious labor, full of slumbering machinery.

  Malvolio led them to the bridge, nestled deep within the ship. Holograms glowed everywhere, around and above the amateur flight crew, showing schematics of the ship and maps of the star system. They all ate and drank food from Malvolio's first delivery.

  Hagen occupied the centrally placed commander's chair, rotating among small projections that surrounded him on all sides. Carol Foster stood beside him, trying to help him puzzle it all out.

  “This thing's got a little more heat than I expected,” Bartley announced from what looked like a weapons console, judging by the schematic holograms that floated around his head. “Railguns, plasma cannon, smart missiles, combat drones...not to mention armor out to here.” Bartley held out his hands as though describing an extremely well-endowed woman. “Looks like somebody expected a fight.”

  “Pirates,” Alanna said. “The ship would be filled with billions of credits' worth of metals by the end of a mining expedition.”

  “They had to worry about military ships, too,” Hagen said. “Once the war started, this would have been a premium target for the Alliance fleet, whether they captured it or destroyed it.” The schematics of the ship still painted glowing diagrams all over his face. He looked at Carol. “I say we switch it all on and see what happens.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” Carol said.

  “I'm always in favor of shooting first and letting God sort 'em out,” Bartley added, while running diagnostics on the weapons systems.

  “Waking up the reactor...I think,” Hagen muttered. “Boosters rockets coming online.” Red lights flickered all over his display, and he sighed. “This could take a while.”

  “We'll need all weapons ready before launch, sir,” Carol told Hagen. “Because of the wormfighters.”

  “What in the rice and gravy did you just say?” Bartley asked. “Wormfighters?”

  “That's what I call them. They keep above the smog line, mostly. They don't seem to like flying down into the canyons, either, which is why I'm still alive. I stayed low, in narrow places, while I scanned for Alanna's signal. But they could come after us once we get above the smoke.”

  “How many fighters?” Hagen asked.

  “I only saw a pair of them, but I didn't stick around long. They kind of looked like horseshoe crabs, curved and wide at the front, with narrow spiny bodies. They fired plasma at me, but I evaded. Then I dropped back into the smog and he
aded for deep canyon. They didn't follow me far.”

  “So we need to be on the lookout for flying, shooting worms.” Hagen scratched his head. “And this ship has no fighters, just a couple of scout-sized research vessels in the hangar.”

  “Hell, I'll take a research ship out there, I don't care,” Bartley said. “Just duct-tape an artillery piece on the roof and I'll zap all the squirmy little bastards myself.”

  “Can you drive your helicopter by remote?” Hagen asked Carol.

  “Yes, and it's got good AI, but it's not going to do much in upper atmosphere. And it has no weapons.”

  “Miss Li-Whitward, do you have any objection to sacrificing that helicopter if we need to?” he asked.

  “Oh, I don't care. It's a rental.” Alanna sat down at an empty workstation and reclined the chair as far as it would go, which was quite far. She closed her eyes. “This is nice.”

  “Rowan, plug into the ship,” Hagen said. Eric felt a little jarred at being addressed by his surname. Hagen was back in warrior mode, showing inner steel that had been formed in training and combat. “Learn your way around this system.”

  “Sure, but I definitely have no idea how to fly this thing. Or how to fly anything. It's one thing to drive a tractor or an exoskeleton, but—”

  “Find a tutorial on those combat drones,” Hagen interrupted. “Foster, you do the same—but find tutorials on how to fly this starship. Flynn, you're in charge of the ship's weaponry.”

  “Obviously,” Bartley said.

  “Lentz, too,” Hagen added, and Naomi nodded while Bartley scowled just slightly. “Both of you load up whatever training software this boat has. Gatekeeper, you're the only scientist we have, so help me figure out whether the ship's reactor and the booster rockets are going to roast us alive when we try to get going.”

  “Okay.” Iris swallowed and approached the command chair. “I'll do my best.”

  “Malvolio, connect with the hangar security systems. Let me know if anything at all happens, any strange sounds or vibrations, anything that could be a sign of worms digging or blasting their way inside.”